Giles' prehistoric adventures

here's some pictures from my explorations while working in America recently; I visited Zion Canyon National Park in Utah - it was astounding! The rock formations defined the landscape: in some places the ground was made of solid rock, lumps of lava rock and other strange formations were all around, and I ended up wading through a river at the bottom of a canyon wearing a wetsuit!(you can see some other people doing the same looking tiny in one of the photos)
I loved working on the Museum - here's hoping there will be more!
I hope you all have a good Easter and fun at the new school!


Giles
(animator and museum enjoyer)

final animation

Destinations Day

Happy Artists!

Meteor Man - Dave Harris

A video extract of Dave's talk to Year 5 on January 18th.

Rocks Alive!

Year 5 and I have been exploring Rocks by using our bodies to create shapes and movements.

Similar to last year, the class has worked in groups to create some ‘live installation’ performance pieces that will be shown on the museum open day.

The groups have explored Rock Types by creating movements to represent each type: layering bodies on top of each other to create Sedimentary rock; making a shape and then twisting and distorting it to create Metamorphic rock; forming a volcano shape and exploding out of it to create Igneous rock.

The groups have worked extremely hard on creating their Rock Type dances. Each group decided what order they wanted to perform the movements in and have also choreographed how they enter and exit the hall.

We have also looked at creating some movements for Giles to film and turn into a mini film. For this, we used as our inspiration parts of the Rock Cycle. We looked at Weathering (where rocks get broken into smaller pieces); Erosion (where the rocks get carried away by water, ice or wind); Deposition (where rocks get dropped down).

For this we played with making shapes on the wall bars and then dropping away from the wall to show rocks breaking up and falling away from a cliff. We also jumped off objects to show rocks in the air. And we rolled over the ground to show rocks being eroded and carried along in a river.

Everyone is looking forward to seeing themselves on film and I am very excited about being at the school on Museum Day to watch the live dance pieces.

Amanda (Choreographer)

Dinosaurs Do Many Things…

Reception class and I have been exploring the wonderful world of dinosaurs together.

We have been 4 legged dinosaurs, 2 legged dinosaurs, dinosaurs that fly, dinosaurs that walk, dinosaurs that run and dinosaurs that swim. We have been tall, short, wide, thin, sleeping, eating, happy, grumpy, quiet, noisy, strong and weak dinosaurs.

We have worked in partners with one partner sculpting the other one into a dinosaur pose. Then, using magic invisible remote controls we have made the dinosaur come to life, move around and even become extinct.

We have played a game of copying a partner’s dinosaur movements and we have pretended to be a dinosaur egg that cracks open to let out a baby dinosaur that miraculously grows up into a big, loud, ferocious dinosaur in just a few seconds.

We have had lots of fun being dinosaurs and taken photos of all our dinosaur dancing, so that the photos can be added to our poem about dinosaurs… Hopefully you will see this on display on Museum Day.

Amanda (Choreographer)